Hiroyuki Tanaka from The Mainichi:
The renewed exhibition room is located on the fifth floor of Mori JP Tower, Japan's tallest building, which opened in November 2023. It includes a special section featuring materials related to Chiune Sugihara (1900-1986), who issued "visas for life" to Jewish refugees during World War II while serving as a vice-consul for the Japanese Empire in Lithuania, and on Shigeru Yoshida (1878-1967), a diplomat who served as foreign minister and prime minister.
Admission to the new exhibition room is free, and unlike the prior facility, it is open on Saturdays, too. It remains closed on Sundays and public holidays.
Akira Iida & Kentaro Mikami from The Mainichi:
The new training and employment system that is expected to take effect in 2027 aims to foster foreign workers to achieve the specified skills visa level over three years once they've entered the country. Meanwhile, more attention will be paid to their rights as workers, and rules on job-changing are being eased to allow transfers over the course of one to two years. The retention of this workforce is an issue that will persist under the new system.
This is a good on-the-ground story about the actual lives of foreign workers trying to integrate into local communities. Also a good example of how local governments are picking up the slack from Tokyo and actually doing the hard work of making a flawed immigration system work for new immigrants and for local businesses.
Naoko Furuyashiki from The Mainichi:
Some 70% of the target procedures have been revised. Of 1,034 that originally required floppy disks, the requirement for the use of the format invented in the 1970s has reportedly been abolished in all but one -- where the Ministry of the Environment is in the process of revising an ordinance.
As a first link post here at Nipponica, this seems appropriate and an accurate way of countering the myth of Japan being a hub of future technology. The biggest problem that plagues government and business processes here are rigid to the point of being almost impossible to change. It took a global pandemic to mostly phase out the use of physical hanko personal seals as legal signatures on official documents.
"Digitization has made considerable progress. We would like to proceed with necessary reviews, including the use of faxes."
Ambitious, Konoさん.